I was a Fortune 500 HR SVP for ten million years, but I was an opera singer before I ever heard the term HR. The higher I got in the corporate world, the more operatic the action became. I started writing about the workplace for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1997, but it took me ages to find my own voice. Now I write for the Huffington Post, Business Week, LinkedIn, the Harvard Business Review, the Denver Post and Forbes.com and lead the worldwide Human Workplace movement to reinvent work for people. Stop by and join us: http://www.humanworkplace.com

Dear Hiring Manager: I've Lived Your Movie

We led a virtual workshop on Pain Letters and a young man named Rodney asked tremendous questions. After the workshop he sent us an email message. “I’ve written my first Pain Letter,” he said. “I’m sending it out tomorrow.”

Rodney had been working as a manager in a retail store and doing very well before he was suddenly laid off. From a full-time job with great benefits and a salary of $55,200 Rodney dropped to no income and no severance pay. All the stores in his region were shuttered at the same time.

“I’m living on unemployment compensation,” Rodney wrote to us.

“I’m looking at taking a temp job that pays $32,000 a year. That won’t pay my rent, and I have a roommate! I may have to move back in with my parents.” Rodney is thirty. There are worse things than moving in with your parents, but we understood Rodney’s pain.

It’s very hard to get where he’d gotten in his career and then drop down to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy one day without warning.

“I can’t make my car payment on unemployment,” said Rodney. He studied the Pain Letter methodology and felt very good about sending out his first Pain Letter. The company was one he had already applied to twice using the Black Hole recruiting portal. Rodney hadn’t heard a word back in response to his two online applications.

He wasn’t entirely surprised since there was no job posted that matched his background, but the radio silence convinced him that a more direct approach was called for.

Rodney figured “What’s the worst thing that can happen? If they don’t want me, they won’t communicate with me, and that’s what is happening right now anyway.”

He wrote to the VP of Operations, Jim, directly.

The company Rodney was targeting didn’t have any posted job openings, but so what? People have pain for months before they post a job ad. Rodney was hoping to run a store or a distribution center for a large retail chain. Here’s what he wrote to the VP of Operations, Jim:

Dear Jim,

I’ve been watching PopularPopular Products’ rise from a local chain to a regional powerhouse. Hats off to you and your team on your explosive growth! Congratulations, also, on moving from 35th place to fourth place in National Retailers’ list of fast-growing retail businesses!

I can only imagine that Popular’s astounding growth is creating some management holes on your team. When I ran the city’s second-highest-grossing store for Bullseye Stores, I took over after three quarters of under-performance and made our store a model for team retention and customer satisfaction. If you have a minute to talk about Popular’s plans for 2015, I’d love to chat.

Best to you and your team,

Rodney Jones

Rodney used the classic four-part Pain Letter formula (the Hook to keep the manager reading, in this case Rodney’s mention of the National Retailers’ recognition; a hypothesis about the Business Pain facing the hiring manager; a Dragon-Slaying Story that relates the Business Pain we’ve just named to Rodney’s own background; and a Closing that invites the reader/manager to contact you if s/he wants to continue the conversation).

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